Wally Funk (1939-2026)

[Orionid]

Podniebna legenda, uczestniczka zaniechanego programu Mercury 13, dołoży do swoich osiągnięć jeszcze jeden zaszczytny wyczyn. 20 lipca 2021 będzie mogła wzbogacić się o skrzydła astronauty odbywając lot na pokładzie NS-16 https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=4485.msg161983#msg161983



Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic Target Crewed Suborbital Flights This Month
By Ben Evans, on July 2nd, 2021

Legend, of course, is word that has been diluted and overused in recent years, but Mary Wallace Funk, born 1 February 1939 in Las Vegas, N.M., is most certainly one. Her enchantment with aircraft began when she was barely a year old, when her parents took her to a local airport and the young girl tried to turn the nut on one of the wheels of a Douglas DC-3. From that instant, Funk’s mother was convinced her daughter would become a pilot. As she grew, she built balsa-wood gliders and had her first flying lesson at nine years old.
https://www.americaspace.com/2021/07/02/blue-origin-virgin-galactic-target-crewed-suborbital-flights-this-month/

AA https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=3495.msg166949#msg166949

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wally_Funk

[Orionid]

'Mercury 13' pilot Wally Funk to fly on Blue Origin's first crewed flight

July 1, 2021 — A woman who sought the same opportunity as NASA's Mercury astronauts will now achieve her lifelong dream flying aboard a vehicle named for the first American to launch into space.

Blue Origin announced on Thursday (July 1) that Wally Funk, one of the so-called "Mercury 13," will join the company's founder, Jeff Bezos, his brother Mark and the winner of a $28 million auction (who is still to be named) on the first crewed flight of the New Shepard launch vehicle, set to lift off on July 20. At 82 years old, Funk will become the oldest person to fly into space. (...)
http://www.collectspace.com/news/news-070121a-blue-origin-new-shepard-wally-funk-mercury13.html

[Orionid]

Guess Who’s Going to Space With Jeff Bezos?
By Marina Koren

Wally Funk has been ready to become an astronaut for six decades.


Trevor Paulhus; Courtesy of Blue Origin

(...) Glenn and Funk took their isolation tests during the exhilarating beginnings of the American space program, but their experiences didn’t overlap. Glenn was part of the Mercury program, NASA’s first attempt to send men—and, at the time, only men—to space, while Funk participated in a privately funded project meant to see how women held up to the pressures of spaceflight. Randy Lovelace, the doctor in charge of the effort, had worked with NASA’s male astronauts, and he suspected that women might fare just as well, or even better, than men in the tiny, cramped spaceships that NASA had planned; women are, on average, lighter and smaller, and would require less food and oxygen, scientists suggested at the time. Lovelace recruited female pilots under 40, matching the age requirements of NASA’s real astronaut corps. (...)
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/07/jeff-bezos-wally-funk-blue-origin/619344/

[Orionid]

82-year-old woman who trained for NASA will go to space with Jeff Bezos
CNNWire   By Jackie Wattles, CNN Business Thursday, July 1, 2021 9:28PM

(...) Funk will fly on New Shepard as an "honored guest," according to a post on Bezos' Instagram, which also shows Bezos revealing to Funk that she will join the mission. She then beams and yells excitedly. (...)

Funk became the youngest woman to graduate from the program, and she was told she "had done better and completed the work faster than any of the guys," she said during a promotional video about her participation in the Blue Origin flight.

Funk even spent 10 hours and 35 minutes inside a sensory deprivation tank in one Mercury 13 test, outperforming famed astronaut John Glenn. (...)

In this 2019 photo made available by NASA, Mercury 13 astronaut trainee Wally Funk visits the Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field in Cleveland, Ohio. NASA via AP
https://abc7chicago.com/jeff-bezos-in-space-blue-origin-flight-wally-funk-new-shepard-launch/10850461/

[Orionid]

Pierwsza  w wielu kategoriach

At age 82, Funk became the oldest woman to go to space on July 20, 2021, as part of Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft during its suborbital flight. But, she had an acclaimed career in aerospace prior to that. She was the first female air safety investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board, the first female civilian flight instructor at Fort Sill, and she was the first female Federal Aviation Agency inspector.

https://journalrecord.com/2021/11/03/space-tourist-wally-funk-to-keynote-event/

https://www.standard.co.uk/insider/wally-funk-82-female-pilot-jeff-bezos-b945269.html

w https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=4485.msg167621#msg167621

[Orionid]

A dziś 84. urodziny niedoszłej astronautki programu Mercury-13.
Wszystkiego najlepszego

http://www.spacefacts.de/bios/candidates/english/funk_mary.htm
http://www.astronautix.com/f/funk.html

https://www.astronaut.ru/index/in_pers/13_l06.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wally_Funk
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wally_Funk

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-21/wally-funk-oldest-person-space-jeff-bezos-rocket/100310720
https://www.urania.edu.pl/wiadomosci/czy-wally-funk-zostanie-najstarsza-astronautka-swiata

https://wallyfly.com/

1er février
Joyeux anniversaire (84) à Wally Funk
(passagère du 1er vol habité de la New Shepard, NS-16, en juillet

https://twitter.com/spacemen1969/status/1620679592414420993

02.02.2024
https://twitter.com/airandspace/status/1753150139215003894

Happy birthday to aviator Wally Funk!
 After being the youngest of the female pilots on the Lovelace Woman in Space Program in the early 1960s, Funk became the oldest woman to fly into space at age 82, in 2021. She never gave up on her dream: https://s.si.edu/3w40ZrS

Wally Funk: Aviation Pioneer

[Orionid]

Mary Wallace Funk (01.02.1939–08.07.2026) [87]

Była ostatnią żyjącą członkinią  grupy "Mercury 13".

Wally Funk, Who Set an Age Record for Space Travel, Dies at 87
By Richard Goldstein July 9, 2026 Updated 3:11 p.m. ET


Wally Funk in 2021, after returning from a roughly 10-minute spaceflight aboard a rocket built by the company Blue Origin. “I loved every minute of it,” she said. “I just wish it had been longer.”Credit...Tony Gutierrez/Associated Press

As a young woman in the 1960s, she wasn’t allowed to become a NASA astronaut. She finally realized her long-held dream of flying in space as an octogenarian.

Wally Funk, who was among the most accomplished female pilots of her time and who, at 82, became the oldest person to fly in space, achieving a goal she had set some 60 years earlier, died on Wednesday at her home in Grapevine, Tex., a suburb of Dallas and Fort Worth. She was 87.

Her death was confirmed by Mona Quintanilla, a spokeswoman for the city of Grapevine.

“Aviation has been my whole life,” Ms. Funk wrote in her 2020 memoir. “I eat it, and I breathe it.”

In the early 1960s, she was among a group of 25 women, later reduced to 13, who were put through rigorous tests at the dawn of the space age to determine how women might fare in space. Ms. Funk was the only aviator in the group — which became known as the Mercury 13 — to pass all the tests.

But seven men, known as the Mercury Seven and tested separately, were selected by NASA to be its first astronauts, because the space agency wasn’t prepared to risk sending women into space. The Mercury Seven included Alan B. Shepard Jr., who became the first American in space when he completed a suborbital flight in May 1961, and John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth.

Ms. Funk made several unsuccessful attempts to be accepted by NASA for its astronaut corps, which didn’t admit women until 1978, when she was 39. The first American woman in space was Sally Ride, a mission specialist on a shuttle flight in 1983. (The first woman in space was Valentina Tereshkova, a Russian who flew a solo mission in 1963.)

But Ms. Funk continued to fly, taught aviation privately and oversaw numerous investigations into air crashes, initially as the first female inspector for the Federal Aviation Administration and later for the National Transportation Safety Board.

She owned a flying school in Taos, N.M.; piloted a twin-engine passenger plane for Sierra Pacific Airlines, based in Tucson, Ariz.; and competed in the women’s transcontinental air races known as the Powder Puff Derby. In her memoir, “Higher Faster Longer,” written with Loretta Hall, Ms. Funk said she had logged more than 19,000 hours of flying.

She was inducted into the Women in Aviation International Pioneer Hall of Fame in 1995 and her name was inscribed on the Wall of Honor at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington in 2017.

Ms. Funk, who never flew for NASA, set her age record for space travel in July 2021, when she took part in a trip that lasted 10 minutes and 19 seconds, aboard New Shepard, a rocket built by Blue Origin, the spaceflight company founded by Jeff Bezos. Mr. Bezos was a passenger on the flight, along with his brother, Mark, and a teenage physics student.

The rocket rose above the 62-mile threshold generally regarded as the beginning of space before returning to Earth.

“We went right on up, and I saw darkness,” Ms. Funk said at a celebratory news conference. “I was going to see the world, but we weren’t quite high enough. I loved every minute of it. I just wish it had been longer.”

That October, William Shatner of “Star Trek” fame, then 90, set a new record for the oldest person to fly in space. In 2024, Ed Dwight, who was also 90 but a few months older than Mr. Shatner had been, became the current record-holder.

Mary Wallace Funk (she preferred Wally) was born in Las Vegas on Feb. 1, 1939, to Losier and Virginia Shy Funk. She grew up in Taos, where her father opened a five-and-dime store selling modestly priced items.

“I got my first try at flying, just pure flying, by flying my Superman cape off my daddy’s barn when I was about 5 years old,” she recalled in a 1999 oral history interview with NASA.

She landed in a pile of hay, but her fascination with flying was undiminished. “I was allowed to make airplanes out of blocks of balsa wood and hang them from my ceiling,” she said in the interview.

“I grew up in an area where you had free spirit,” she added. “I was brought up by the Indians of a Taos pueblo, and they taught me how to fish and hunt and camp at a very early age and survive the wilderness. So I had all that going for myself, where a youngster today is in a city, in an apartment, and that’s all they know. They don’t know ocean and skiing and snow and air as I was able to know it.”

Ms. Funk obtained a pilot’s license while attending Stephens College in Columbia, Mo., a two-year women’s school, and then enrolled at Oklahoma State University, which had a prominent flight school.

She had a rating for piloting a glider and a seaplane by the time she was 19. Later, she recalled that there were “never any eyes raised or eyebrows raised about ‘What’s that girl doing?’”

After graduating from Oklahoma State, she became a flight instructor at the Fort Sill, Okla., army base before beginning her long road to spaceflight.

Ms. Funk, who never married, has no immediate survivors.

Before Ms. Funk’s Blue Origin flight in 2021, Tanya Harrison, a planetary scientist and director of science strategy at Planet Labs, told The New York Times, “Seeing her finally get to go into space decades after proving that she was not only capable, but perhaps more capable than the men she was essentially up against during the Mercury program is so incredible.”

When the flight was over, Ms. Funk said she had one overriding desire: “I want to go again, fast.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/science/space/wally-funk-dead.html

Funk died peacefully on Wednesday evening at her apartment in an assisted living facility in Grapevine, Texas, city councilwoman and close friend Duff O’Dell said on Thursday. O’Dell, who described herself as Funk’s caregiver, said she was by Funk’s side. Funk had fallen a couple of times recently and had an infection in her leg. “It took its toll,” O’Dell told the Associated Press.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/09/wally-funk-astronaut-dies
https://twitter.com/ArinzeOkpala2/status/2075556550282826051

[Orionid]

Wally Funk, last of the 'Mercury 13' and oldest woman in space, dies

July 9, 2026 — Wally Funk, who in 2021 became the oldest woman to fly into space — 60 years after she and 12 other women sought the same opportunity as NASA's original astronauts — has died at the age of 87.

Funk was the last living member of the First Lady Astronaut Trainees (FLATs, or as they were later dubbed by the media, the "Mercury 13"), a group of women pilots who volunteered to go through the same physical and psychological tests as the United States' first spacemen.
https://www.collectspace.com/news/news-070926a-wally-funk-mercury-13-civilian-astronaut-obtiuary.html

[Orionid]

W wieku 19. lat miała uprawnienia pilota szybowca i wodnosamolotu.
Zdążyła dotknąć kosmosu.
https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=4485.msg206672#msg206672

Jeff Bezos @JeffBezos 1:36 AM · Jul 10, 2026
Wally Funk waited 60 years to get to space, and no one ever earned it more. She trained with the Mercury 13 in 1961, out-tested the men, and was told no anyway. She never stopped flying — 19,600 hours, thousands of students, a lifetime of firsts.

Five years ago this month, I had the honor of flying with her on New Shepard's first crewed flight. At 82, she was fearless, joyful, and asking to go again before we’d even landed.

Her dream took six decades, but it came true. Dreams have no expiration date. Godspeed, Wally.

https://twitter.com/JeffBezos/status/2075363502441865592